Is it just me, or as people get older does “be stubborn” move higher up on their list of priorities?

Is it just me, or as people get older does “be stubborn” move higher up on their list of priorities?

With pride month, having come to a close I wanted to share a little anecdote about an incident that happened at my workplace last week. A couple of days ago I was talking with my co-worker (the one I’ve mentioned in some of my previous blogs) about health and the healthcare industry. He complained (like he always does) about how the healthcare industry only treats the symptoms while not addressing the root causes of the problems. Now I don’t disagree on that, but I pointed out the fact that many of our problems are due to stress and people stressing themselves out over things that aren’t really that big of a deal. For example, conservatives getting themselves all worked up over, woke, pride flags and transgender. Naturally this set him off and in doing so, proving my point. I couldn’t help but find it ironic that a man who complains about not addressing the root causes of health problems due to stress then goes on to ignore the very problems he acknowledges. It amazes me how people can be so blind to their own hypocrisy.

I pointed out how most people who complain about “woke” can’t even define the word. I quoted a phrase I heard someone say online, that woke “just means you’re not a closed minded moron.” To which my co-worker countered “that’s what it used to mean”. I told him the right perverted the term to mean anything they don’t like, to which he agreed and promptly defended that definition. In other words my co-worker basically admitted, “yeah I know ‘woke’ has become a catch all term for anything I don’t like and I’m okay with that. I agree with that!” (he didn’t actually say that but that’s what I got from his rant). So since the radical right co-opted the term woke, does that apply to other things too? When Putin, unjustly, invaded Ukraine he adopted the letter ‘Z’ as his war symbol. Does that mean that anyone who uses the letter ‘Z’ in anything automatically supports the war? Do we ban the last letter of the alphabet? When the anti-vaccine “freedom” convoy caused their disruption in Ottawa other protesters across the world used our flag as a symbol of support. Does that mean anyone who displays a Canadian flag is one of the “freedom” convoy?

He then went off ranting about transgender because “if you call someone by the wrong pronoun they start shouting at you.” Now I don’t know if that was an actual incident that happened to him. Maybe he met someone who was having a bad day, he called them by the wrong pronoun and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Maybe it’s was my co-worker’s karma. He’s a closed minded intolerant man who met another closed minded person who lashed out the way my co-worker would, now he assumes that all trans-people do it. Or more likely, he saw/read it online and believed it. The truth is more likely that if people are getting upset at you for using the wrong gender pronouns it’s probably because you’re deliberately choosing to use the wrong pronouns, in which case you’re getting what you deserve.

He then went off about how we’re not strict enough with kids and that parents are letting kids as young as 14 go out at 3 o’clock in the morning. Now first of all, I’m not saying that never happens, but it’s not the huge problem he makes it out to be. It’s not a rampant problem spreading all over the world like wildfire. Secondly, is he implying that the reason the trans-community even exists is because kids are out partying at 3 AM? I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing. Now I personally don’t know any trans-people (at least not that I’m aware of because I don’t pry into people’s gender identity, it’s none of my business), but I’m pretty sure that if someone’s gender identity doesn’t align with the gender they were assigned at birth, it’s NOT because their parents let them go out partying all night long before they hit puberty. That’s not a thing.

The irony of course is that if we were to take his advice about being more strict and stop “babying” people (he always claims people are too sensitive and we “baby” them too much) and apply that to him; start yelling at him to stop being such a sensitive little baby or otherwise discipline him every time he starts acting out this way, I’m certain he’d just dig in his heels and double down because being a stubborn old geezer is more important to him. It just proves that he really has no idea what he’s talking about. As I’ve often pointed out, the more you tell someone “NO” the more likely they are to defy you out of spite, I admit I’m guilty of that (more so when I was younger). I should also point out that he often complains that no one treats anyone with respect, then turns around and does the very thing he accuses others of doing. So what’s the moral of the story? Discrimination is wrong…unless it’s against group X, then it’s okay?!

The truth is that it doesn’t matter what people like him think. The world is changing, humanity in general is becoming more open minded, more tolerant than we were years ago. I know it doesn’t seem that way but that’s only because people like my co-worker are the “vocal minority”. They’re only a small percentage of the general population but because they whine and complain the loudest people assume their numbers are greater than they actually are. The fact is more and more young people are becoming more enlightened, more “woke”. More millennials (people my age, who are technically middle age now) are not becoming more conservative as we get older (actually I’ve gotten more progressive as I’ve gotten older). We on the left are growing in numbers, while those on the right are shrinking. That’s the real reason conservatives have gotten more extreme is because they know the world is changing, and they don’t like it, they can’t stop it. They’re really just scared, frightened little children lashing out at a world they don’t understand, they don’t want to understand. Unfortunately for them, the world’s not going to go back to the way it was, the way they want it to be. Thus like small children, they’re throwing a collective temper tantrum because they’re not getting their way.

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